Video conferencing is a communication manner that allows users at two or more places to hold a conference by using televisions and telephones, where voice and pictures are transferred in real time. By using this service, customers, colleagues, and partners at any place may be connected to hold a conference together. This is especially useful for an enterprise having a plurality of branches to hold a global conference or a conference across different regions. A typical multipoint conference system includes a management platform, multipoint control units (MCU for short), and a terminal. The management platform provides core functions of the multipoint conference system, such as resource management, conference management and scheduling, and user management. The multipoint control units and the terminals are in a point-to-point connection and cooperate to establish a multipoint conference; and the terminal may be a video terminal, an audio terminal, or an audio and video combined terminal.
Video conferencing terminals may be distributed around the globe, and it is impossible to use one multipoint control unit to meet requirements; therefore, in order to ensure conference quality, multipoint conferences need to be cascaded on a plurality of multipoint control units, so that a terminal accesses a multipoint control device nearby.
In the prior art, referring to FIG. 1, a large-scale conference is defined by using a management platform, where the large-scale conference includes several small-scale conferences. Conference data is associated with a plurality of MCUs. A terminal calls a conference access number of a small-scale conference. The management platform holds these small-scale conferences and then cascades different MCUs allocated to the small-scale conferences, thereby implementing cascading of the small-scale conferences. However, the small-scale conferences need to be separately held before being cascaded, and an administrator must know a conference access number of each small-scale conference, where operations are very complex.